Posts Tagged ‘Good’

Is Your Backup Good Enough?

As someone who has seen quite a few hard drive crashes over the years, I believe that performing a full backup of your computer’s hard drive should be an important part of your weekly (if not daily) routine. There’s nothing more frustrating & costly than trying to restore a computer with only a handful of Floppy disk drives, a couple of scratched CD-ROMs or poorly stored backup tapes.

All too often have I been called upon to try and get a home or office computer working again, only to find that the backup (if any) consists of a few word files and maybe a copy of some accounts data?

Now you might be thinking what’s wrong with that? Aren’t those the important files? Well, yes! But what about your Emails, Address book, all your Desktop/Internet Shortcuts, FTP settings, Anti-Spam & Anti-Popup filters etc.? You’ve spend months if not years getting your PC looking and running just the way you like it and in one split second it’s all gone.

Now assuming you’ve got all these backed-up, just think, how long it’s going to take even for an experienced technician to re-install the Operating System and then all your programs like MS Office etc. and that’s if you can find the original CD-ROMs that came with your PC. Plus what about the programs & updates you downloaded from the Internet and stored on your now crashed hard drive. What a nightmare!

So you do the best you can with what you’ve got and get your PC back to some useable state, but it’s only then you fully realize how poor your backup really was and how much time & money you lost while waiting for your system to be restored, not to mention the repair bill.

But you’re probably thinking to yourself, backups take so long to complete and how can you be sure your backing up all the necessary data? Well, as I see it, the only way you can be guaranteed you’re getting all your data is to create what’s called an image of your system (C:) drive.

By creating an image of your hard drive you are basically taking a snapshot or complete copy of your drive at a moment in time, you can then use that image to restore your system drive with a few clicks of the mouse and in a fraction of the time & hassle than with the earlier example.

You will need to have a second hard disk installed on your PC to store your image. I’d recommend one of equal size to your C: drive, you can use drives with less storage capacity but this would mean you’d probably have to apply compression when creating the image.

You’ll also need a backup software capable of creating drive images. There are numerous softwares available such as True Image from Acronis and Norton Ghost from Symantec to name but a few and most of these will allow you to schedule backups to run even when your away from your PC.

With regularly created full backup images, stored securely on a secondary drive out of harms way you can put your mind at ease and get on with more important tasks safe in the knowledge that when disaster strikes you’ll be more than capable of handling it. With a few mouse clicks you can start the restore procedure, go for a short break (have lunch, stroll around the block, catch up on some phone calls etc.) and in no time you’ll be up & running as if nothing had ever happened.

Give yourself that extra piece of mind and do something about putting a reliable backup system in place right now, because you know it’s not a matter of if your hard drive crashes but when and will you be ready for it?

You need to ask yourself… is your backup good enough?

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A Good Backup is Critical to Data Recovery

Copyright (c) 2008 Thomas Husnik

We are sometimes spoiled these days when it comes to data and software on our personal computers. We can store so much of it on one disk drive and we can retrieve it very quickly. And these personal computers just hum along for week after week with no problems whatsoever. We are even prudent in backing up our “My Documents” folder to a re-writeable CD once in awhile.

Until one day, you computer does not boot up. You take it to a computer repair shop and they replace the disk drive, reload Windows, and deliver it back to you. You then reload your Microsoft Office, copy back your “My Documents Folder” from your CD-RW disc and you should be back in business. Except a short time later you find out that you are missing that spreadsheet that took days to build. What happened? Then you remember that you had stored the spreadsheet on the C:spreadsheets folder and not “My Documents.” The spreadsheet and all the work that went into it is goneforever.

The above scenario happens way too often in today’s world that is so dependent on computer information. The point you should see here is that even though the user was doing a backup, the backup did not include everything required in order to one day do a successful recovery. While our example is simple, imagine a computer where there are data files stored all over the disk in many different folders other than “My Documents.” And in most cases a couple of CD-RW disks are too small to backup everything. You need to acquire and implement a backup system and strategy that gives you the space required to store all your critical files plus one that allows you to backup and recover quickly.

Backups are typically done using tape or external hard disk drives. The latter is becoming more and more popular because of the speed of the backup media. An external hard drive can basically be a mirror of your internal hard drive. However, you don’t have the redundancy (multiple copies) of disk files that you could get with tape unless you purchase several disk drives (which could be expensive). But, with an external drive, you can just copy folders from your system drive to your external drive and you have a quick data backup that is very easy to recover.

The other long-time popular method for doing backups is tape. Tape backups have been around for a long time and for good reason. You can store an incredible amount of data on one tape and you get the benefit of being able to take that tape and store it at some alternate location so that you can recover in the event of some physical disaster such as fire, theft, or flood. If you stored external disk drives offsite, you would lose the benefit of being able to use that drive. There are a couple of drawbacks to tape. One is that tape breaks much easier than an external drive. The other is that tape drives come with proprietary software in order to compress and transfer data to the vendor’s model of drive. In other words, they are not native to the operating system like Microsoft Windows. But it usually is only a matter of installing the software on the computer system you are recovering the data to.

There are many variations to tape and external disk drive backups but the important thing to remember is that you cannot recover if you do not properly back up. You should periodically test your recovery plan so that you know it is ready when you need it.

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